July 14, 2017

‘My name is Sherman Alexie and I was born from loss and loss and loss and loss and loss and loss and loss and loss and loss and loss and loss and loss and loss.’

From “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me” (Little, Brown and Company, 2017, Page 141), a memoir by the Native American writer Sherman Alexie.

How do we, as readers, handle repetition? In my experience, we mostly skip it. The human brain is notoriously frugal with its energy. It likes to identify patterns, file them away and move on to more exciting things. Sherman Alexie’s sentence repeats the word ‘‘loss’’ 13 times, and my mind tolerates about three of them before it wants to skip ahead, bundling the rest as simply ‘‘a whole lot of loss.’’ (Alexie’s memoir makes clear that he is, indeed, the product of quite a lot of loss: the decimation and displacement of his tribe, the diversion of his people’s sacred salmon by a dam, the early deaths of his grandparents, the loss of his own childhood to abuse and on and on and on.)

Sometimes, however, repetition transcends mere accumulation. It can be a kind of statement in itself, and the only way to appreciate its full meaning is to force your brain to plow right through it, slowly, word by word.

When you force yourself to move all the way through Alexie’s sentence, loss by loss by loss by loss — like fingering prayer beads or counting breaths in meditation — a strange thing occurs. Everyone knows the childhood game of saying a familiar word so many times that it becomes alien, and that’s what happens here: By the 13th iteration, ‘‘loss’’ feels less like a word than like a sort of mouth-stone, strange and round, burbling out of your open face over and over and over again, like eggs out of a relentless chicken. In speaking this sentence, you turn, involuntarily, into a magical hen of loss. By the end of reading it aloud, you will have lost your breath, temporarily lost your mind and lost, for about 15 seconds, the ability to recognize ‘‘loss’’ as a word in the English language. And so a sentence on loss becomes self-fulfilling: a chance to experience loss.

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